Wittgenstein’s Legacy: The Principles of the Private Language Arguments (2018)

IMO, the best thing to take away from Wittgenstein is that he understood how words acquire meaning -- through usage in context -- and that two people can think they are talking about the same thing but if there is any difference in how they use the terms, or any variation in what contexts they consider them appropriate, then they cannot be talking about the same thing, because they aren't using the words the same way in the same context.

Learning language is like learning a certain kind of morality: which words are 'proper' to use in which order, situation, etc. (And you can always find stark disagreement where any moralities diverge.) The wisdom of all this is to instead focus on where people have agreement, by establishing shared definitions, axioms, or even participation in activities. These kinds of things are 'meaning multipliers'.

I found this amusing. It's definitely possible to not know one is in pain.

> And if that were so, it would be possible for me to make a mistake about whether I am in pain or not, and it would be possible for me to doubt whether I am in pain, but not to be sure. But none of these are genuine possibilities. So, this route is closed.

But they are, though. I think anyone who has suffered from chronic pain and/or dissociation has experienced these 'impossibilities'. I think this might be beside the point of the argument, that the author chose a naive working example that makes sense to him, but I need to further think about what it means to say "I was in pain" a while after asking myself "Am I in pain?" likewise "I wasn't in pain". It seems to me that the arguments laid out here rest on a transparency of language that doesn't actually exist.

> But it does not describe an impossibility either – for a logical or mathematical impossibility is not a possibility that is impossible. The sequence of words has been shown to have no sense – to be a nonsense.

Ok, but if something is nonsense, i.e. nothing, then it has no meaning. But the demonstration of an impossibility theorem in mathematics most definitely has non-trivial meaning. It is not obvious that you can't trisect the angle, and there is a minimally complex way to obtain the result which is certainly more complex than, say, the impossibility of 1 = 2 in the integers. But if they're both nonsense (i.e. nothing, as the author says), then I can't ascribe this complexity of proving their impossibility to them, for I would be able to make some sense of nonsense.

Now, even in most constructive logics there is no sense ascribed to a theorem of "A => 0", but this, in my opinion, should be considered a flaw in logic, the absurd does have meaning! No one thinks that Wiles proved that nonsense was nonsense, an immediately obvious statement. Nonsense can appear as sense for so long that you would never know it was any different.

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I think my rumination above as I read are very shallow (and I have spared y'all from many more), but I have been wanting to read Wittgenstein for quite some time now and I think this writing will motivate me to do it sooner. At the very least Wittgenstein is irresistible to engage with. I think one of my main problems is with the reliance on logical possibility as fully coherent.

I'll give you that for "truth". We could poke further; we would just get a bigger bowl of word salad.

The value is in the application. At the risk of sounding like Yoda, this is like walking into a large hall with other people and noticing that really good dance music is playing. People are moving around the dance floor. So you say to your partner "This is great!" and being dancing.

What's great about it? "There is a pattern of activity that I find pleasing that I can join in and feel as if I am accomplishing something of value"

Except in Wittgenstein's case, all the people were dancing, but they were all dancing to different songs and in their own invented way of dancing. Now there's nothing wrong with inventing your own songs and dance moves, mind you, but Wittgenstein was the guy that pointed out that this was what was happening.

And now we being discussing "Can we all listen to the same music", and "Who likes Jazz?", and so forth. We've opened up a new class of exploration that didn't exist before.

My guess is that Wittgenstein thought that either you'd play the music loudly enough and one dance would win (unlikely), or that it was impossible for such a large group to agree to much of anything, from the genre of music to the types of moves that looked cool. (more likely) But then you get into even more interesting issues, like how large of a group can agree on anything, what does it mean to agree on language, and so forth. We've joined the social to the philosophical in a way that had never been done before. I could go on at length, and probably would. I'd love to drag Kuhn and Popper into this. I apologize for being so wordy.